Ephenation is a MMORPG in an adventure setting that supports player defined additions.
This is a blog where I show the progress from making the game. Main focus is on the application of OpenGL. I hope this will help others to benefit from my mistakes and experiences.
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21 juni 2012

Doing animations in OpenGL

This document explains how to do animations in OpenGL based on skeletal animation. The basic idea is to define the skin mesh once, and then only update the bones position. I will not show how to create the buffers (VBO) and uniforms, which is readily available elsewhere. Instead, I concentrate on how to interpret and prepare the animation data. In principle, animation is implemented in four steps:

2.Load the data in the initialization phase of the application, transform and pre compute as much as possible.

3.For every frame to be drawn, use interpolation to compute a transformation matrix for each joint.

4.Let the shader do the final transformation of each vertex (skin section), as depending on the joint matrices.

Step one is only needed once, of course. Step two can conveniently be done by a custom conversion tool, and saved in a special file. Blender was used for creating the models. There are lots of tutorials about this, so I am not going to go into many details. For some background to animation and skinning, see Animation in video games by Jason Gregory.

Any comments are welcome, I will try to correct or improve.

Model file format

I use Assimp to load the model files. There are many possible formats that can be used, and it is not obvious which one is best. In a commercial project, consider using a custom format. This has the advantage that loading will be quick, and the files will be harder to copy. Also, the main application doesn't need to know about file formats of 3D modeling applications.

The easiest format is probably the .obj format, but it does not support animations and bones. I use the Collada (.dae) file format. Make sure not to use the pre transformation flag for vertices (aiProcess_PreTransformVertices), as this will remove the bones data.

Definitions

offset matrix: The matrix transforming from mesh space to bone space, also called the inverse bind pose transform in Assimp.

node matrix: a node's transformation matrix in relation to its parent node.

bind pose and rest position: The original position of a model.

frame: One complete picture rendering.

The words "bone" and "joint" are used now and then, but really mean the same in this text.

Bind pose and current pose

The bind pose is the rest position; the position where no animation has been applied. This is the position the meshes get when the influence of the bones are ignored. The current pose is one frame in an animation. The bones information in the node tree (pointed at from the aiNode) defines the bind pose of the skeleton.

Assimp data structure

Arrows represents pointers, and the blue dashed arrows represent references by name or index.

Mesh dependency of bones

In rest position, each mesh has a transformation matrix that is relative to its parent (as defined by the node tree aiNode). However, when doing animations, there is instead a list of bones that the mesh depends on. The offset matrix (in aiBone) defines how to get the mesh position in relation to these bones. When the animation bones are in rest position, the resulting transformation matrix will be the same as the mesh transformation matrix (in aiNode). If there is more than one mesh, a bone may be used more than once, with different offset matrices and weight tables for each mesh.

Every vertex in a mesh can depend on several joints. This is defined by the aiBonelist inaiMesh. This list is a sub set of all bones, restricted to those that have an effect on the mesh. To make the shader program efficient, it has to have a reasonable limit on the number of joints. In my case, I want to limit this to at most three joints. Assimp has support for this, using the flag aiProcess_LimitBoneWeightswith

importer.SetPropertyInteger(AI_CONFIG_PP_LBW_MAX_WEIGHTS, 3);

Key frames and interpolation

An animation is like a movie; there are a number of frames every second. Using 24 frames every second would require a lot of data. Instead, only key frames are used, and interpolation in between. The key frames can be defined at irregular time intervals. A movement of a bone consists of three parts: scaling, rotation, and translation. The scaling is usually not needed, but rotation and translation are. Interpolating translation movement is trivial, as the translation is linear. To convert from a key frame data to a transformation matrix, I use the code as follows. Scaling, rotation and translation, are values copied from the scaling key, quaternion key, and position key, respectively, and coded as the corresponding glm type.

Rotation is coded as quaternions. That means that interpolation is efficient and of high precision. However, OpenGL uses 4x4 matrices for transformations. Interpolation with matrices (also called linear blend skinning) work well with scaling and translation, but not for rotation. For example, interpolating a rotation that is only given with two points 180 degrees from each other will cut a straight line through the origo instead of following the arc. The interpolation of rotation need to be done before the quaternion is converted to a matrix to avoid this problem.

There is a performance problem with using interpolation on quaternions between key frames. The interpolation itself is very quick, but the problem is the bone parent/child dependency. The interpolation has to be done for every bone. When combined with the scaling and translation, it will generate a new transformation matrix that is relative to the parent node. To get the final transformation matrix (the bone matrix), the result has to be multiplied with the parent node, etc., all the way up to the top node. Finally, the offset matrix has to be applied to each of them. This is a lot of work to do on the CPU for every frame that is going to be drawn. If interpolation is done only on transformation matrices, it is possible to pre calculate each matrix (from aiNodeAnim), including the offset matrix. It is a simplification I am using, which adds the requirement on the models to have a sufficient number of key frames when describing rotations.

Animation preparation

For a frame in an animation sequence, the bone (and mesh) positions defined in the node tree (aiNode) are not used. However, the information about parent/child relations is still needed. Instead, new positions are defined by aiNodeAnim. For every bone (called channel in aiAnimation), there are a couple of key frames. Problem is, this bone depends on the parent bone. That is, a bone defined in aiNodeAnim has a position defined relative to the parent node. As every bone can have different number of key frames, at independent times, a bone position may depend on a parent bone that does not have a defined position for the same key frame. To simplify, it was decided that all bones shall use the same number of key frames, at the same times.

Dopesheet

When exporting animation from Blender, set the model is in rest position. Otherwise, the mesh offset matrices in the node tree (aiNode) will be set to the current bone position, instead for the rest position of the bone. You will want to toggle this mode back when working with the animations. It doesn't change the result of the animation, but it helps to debug if you want to compare to the rest position.

Rest position

Blender and bones

Blender has the 'z' axis pointing upward. Bones in Blender have they have their own coordinate system, with 'y' is pointing in the direction of the bone. That means, when an upright bone is added as seen from the ‘z’ axis of Blender, that the bone will have the local coordinate system where 'y' is up. This corresponds to a rotation of -pi/2 on the 'x' axis to get to the Blender space. That means that a rotation transformation is needed when using bones for animations. This is done automatically, and created in the export file from Blender. A typical result is a transformation matrix:

1 0 0 0

0 0 1 0

0 -1 0 0

0 0 0 1

This matrix will set the y value to the z value, and the z value to -y. It is possible to enable the display of the bone's local coordinate system in Blender in the Armature tab, "Axis" checkbox. These rotations, and counter rotations, unfortunately make it a little harder to debug and understand the matrix transformations.

Notice that OpenGL doesn't have the same coordinate system ('z' is by default pointing out of the screen) as Blender, which means that you eventually will have to make a model rotation of your own. If you don't, your models will lay down on the side.

Matrix multiplication

Exporting to Collada format from Blender usually gives a node tree (aiNode) as follows:

Scene

..Armature

....Bone1

......Bone2

..Mesh

Mesh matrices are relative to the Scene, and has to be computed just like the bones. If that isn't done, all meshes will be drawn over each other, at the same position.

Each node inaiNodeAnim has a matrix that transforms to the parent node. To get the final transformation matrix of Bone2, a matrix multiplication is needed: Scene*Armature*Bone1*Bone2. This is true for the bind pose, as well as for the animations of bones. But when computing animation matrices, data from aiNodeAnim is used and replace the data from aiNode. When testing that animation works, start with defining an animation at the same rotation, location and scaling as the bind pose. That would give bone replacement matrices that are the same as the originally defined in aiNode.

The above matrix multiplication gives the final matrices for each bone. But that can't be used to transform the mesh vertices yet, as it will give the animated locations of the bones. The mesh absolute rest position is Scene*Mesh. Instead of using the mesh transformation matrix from the node tree, a new mesh matrix is computed based on the bones and an offset. There is a matrix that is meant for exactly that, and it is the offset matrix in aiBone. The new mesh matrix is Scene*Armature*Bone1*Bone2*Offs. This is the bone matrix that shall be sent to the shader.

Animation shader

This is the animation vertex shader, with functions irrelevant to animation removed.

bonesMatrix: Up to 64 joints can be used in a model. It is a uniform, as the same list of bones is used for all vertices.

vertex: This is a vertex from the mesh that is going to be animated by 0 to 3 bones.

joints: The index of three joints for the current vertex.

weights: The weights to be used for the three joints. There is one set of weights for each vertex.

Debugging

To debug the application, you can do as follows

Change the shader so as to use the identity matrix instead of bones matrix. That should draw the mesh in bind pose.

Do the same thing, but use bone indices to make a color in the fragment shader. That way, you can verify that the right bones are selected by the indices.

Instead, use weight information to make a color, that way you can test that the weights are correctly transferred.

To help debug an animation application, there are tools where matrix multiplication can easily be tested. I use Octave for this.

Column major and row major

The expressions column major and row major denotes how a matrix is stored in memory. OpenGL and glm use column major, DirectX and Assimp use row major. glm is the math library used in the Ephenation project. This isn't much of a problem, except when a conversion from one to another is needed. The most effective conversion would have been to simply copy 16 consecutive floats for a 4x4 matrix when converting from Assimp aiMatrix4x4 to glm::mat4, but it won't work because of different layouts in memory. I used the following:

14 kommentarer:

Got some time on vacation to read through this. Have done skeletal, but haven't used ASSIMP for skeletal import, so that's what I most wanted to learn from your tutorial. Good stuff -- thanks. A few comments. Will split them up so threaded discussion is easier.

First, you note that the bone "offset matrix" transforms "from bone space to mesh space in bind pose". Per ASSIMP docs, I believe this is backwards. At the URL below, the ASSIMP docs state: "aiBone ... Its offset matrix declares the transformation needed to transform from mesh space to the local space of this bone."

This mesh OBJECT-SPACE to BONE-SPACE transform is more commonly called the "inverse bind pose" transform.

In "Key frames and interpolation", it has the transformation order being RTS (rotate, translate, scale). However, the usual order is SRT (scale, rotate, translate), and the ASSIMP docs confirm that it uses the usual order:

http://assimp.sourceforge.net/lib_html/structai_node_anim.html

"The order in which the transformations are applied is as usual - scaling, rotation, translation."

Confirmed. I didn't use the scaling, so I never noticed the problem. The rotation and translation was correct, but I improved the code example to make it easier to read, as well as using consistent explanations.

In "Key frames and interpolation" it states "Interpolation with matrices work well with scaling and translation, but not for rotation. ... The interpolation of rotation need to be done before the quaternion is converted to a matrix to avoid this problem."

But then the shader code proceeds to do standard Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), which interpolates matrices containing different rotations, and can result in the same "cut a straight line through the [origin] instead of following the arc" problem you state you are trying to avoid.

You're on the right track, but in general what you want is beyond what Linear Blend Skinning can give you (without having a lot more closely spaced keyframes than what you'd otherwise need). Do a web search for Spherical Blend Skinning (SBS) and Dual Quaternion Skinning (DQS) for some skinning techniques that will avoid the "cut a straight line" problem that LBS has (leading to joint collapse) and give you true rotational motion about the joints.

In "Key frames and interpolation", it says "There is a performance problem with using interpolation on quaternions. ... If interpolation would have been done only on the transformation matrices, it would be possible to pre-calculate each matrix ... including the offset matrix.

The terminology doesn't make what you're saying clear here but I think you are talking about temporal interpolation of bone (joint) keyframe data (aiNodeAnim) using just the final "skinning transforms", also called "bone (joint) final transforms" in some contexts (and which you call "bone matrix" in your Definitions section).

This capability, in fact, is exactly what Spherical Blend Skinning (SBS) and Dual Quaternion Skinnning (DQS) give you over Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) -- nice, angular rotation interpolation via quaternions, all on the GPU even, and without much additional cost at all. In fact, in some cases SBS can be cheaper than LBS.

I didn't get a clear picture from your write-up of what conceptual transform was actually stored in aiNodeAnims. Looking at another ASSIMP skeletal tutorial here:

http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/www/tutorial38/tutorial38.html

(specifically the Mesh::ReadNodeHeirarchy() code), I get the impression that this (which I think you call a "node matrix") contains the product of the bone (A)nimation transform (a rotation of the bone in the bone's local space) and the bone's (O)rientation transform (which transforms you from bone space to parent bone space). This is sometimes called the bone (L)ocal transform (L=A*O).

In the "Blender and bones" section, the mention "This corresponds to a rotation of -pi/2 on the 'x' axis." This took me a little bit to figure out because you didn't state which space you're transforming "to". I believe the target space is the common one used for OpenGL EYE-SPACE, where you're looking down -Z, with X right and Y up. You might mention that just so it's simpler to understand.

In the "Matrix Multiplication" section, it says "Each node in aiNodeAnim has a matrix that transforms from the parent. To get the transformation matrix of Bone2, ..."

Here again I "think" aiNodeAnim contains the bone local transform (L), which applies the bone animation transform (A) and then the bone orientation transform (O). The latter transforms from that bone's space "to" its parent bone's space, not "from". Please check me on that, but if so, I think you need "to" here not "from".

And again, use of the generic "the transformation matrix" for (in this case) the joint global matrix (G) (a different transform from last time, which does not include the inverse bind pose aka offset matrix) is a bit confusing. It might help clarity to give these transforms names and use the specific names.

Lars Pensjö? The creator of LpMUD from which one of best drivers (CD) and MUDs (Genesis) originated? I've been playing Genesis since 95 as a teenager, and been developing another non-english MUD based on CD driver for many years. I took my first steps in object oriented programming thanks to LPC. This is an honor, Sir :)

I found this tutorial looking for some info on skeletal animation, its really great to see you're now working with OpenGL and from what I see on this blog you keep interest in some virtual worlds. I've been through countless MUD engines in the past (Pike and DGD being most recent ones) and I was always fascinated by MUD environments which had great atmosphere, unlike present MMO games. I'm also working on some engine that may (or may not) become some kind of game similar to MUDs of old (if you're interested, previous project's blog is here - http://prediter.blogspot.com/ it was suspended and is now continued in less complex form, as implementing a real planet turned out to be way too complex and wouldn't add nearly as much to the gameplay as it cost to implement)